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Philippines Page 1: Anilao
In July 1999, I (George) signed up for a scuba course that required completion of nine dives. Hong Kong isn't the most exciting place in the world to dive, even when you dive as far as possible from the toxic swill in the harbor, so when I heard about a reasonably priced dive trip to Anilao, I opted to do the theory portion of the course in Hong Kong and the actual dives in the Philippines.
As it ended up, there was only one other person on the dive trip - a German guy named Hans. We flew from HK to Manila on Philippine Airways. Coach class was pretty much the two of us and 200 Filipina "amahs". (If you didn't know, one of the major industries in the Philippines is exporting domestic workers to places like Hong Kong, and every public holiday the flights home to the Philippines are booked solid by young Filipinas lugging six times their weight in blue jeans and electronic goods). There was also a guy who actually lit up a cigarette before one of the flight attendants explained the meaning of the little cigarette in a red circle with a line through it. The flight wasn't great, but it didn't matter much since HK to Manila is only an hour and a half in the air (plus half an hour of taxiing at Hong Kong's big new airport). The more time-consuming part of the trip came after we landed.
After avoiding the guys who were basically trying to trick us into waiting for our transport in the wrong area (so we'd have to pay them to drive us after our guy seemed not to arrive), we found the driver who had been sent to meet us - who was, ironically, in the wrong area. Much to our amusement, he was indeed waiting with a sign that had Hans's last name on it, but unfortunately he was standing in a waiting area for "K", which has nothing to do with Hans's name. We threw our gear in the back of his pick-up truck and squeezed into the rear seats. We then rode for 3 hours: the first half was sitting in Manila traffic, and the second half was on a winding road through the hills of the Batangas peninsula south of Manila. Useless information that I gathered later: Batangas is perhaps best known for its butterfly knives.
Our inadvertent tour of Manila was actually interesting. The Philippines are nothing if not colorful, with lots of brightly painted jeepneys, zillions of little roadside shops, and pedicabs and motorized tricycles threading their way through the traffic and the narrow side streets. We drove through pretty late at night, and I was surprised at how many people were out and about. The whole place has a pretty lively feel to it. Unfortunately, it also has a pretty congested feel to it, especially when it comes to the traffic in Manila.
If you don't know what a jeepney is, it's a sort of homegrown Philippines answer to the Suburban. A lot of them are apparently just for private use, but many more are for informal public transport. The thing that makes them unique is the amount of effort that goes into their appearance. They all seem to have a name, which is painted on conspicuously, along with any other information the owner wants to share with the world. I even saw one that proclaimed a "Case No.," whatever that refers to. They are usually brightly painted, often with a lot of shiny metal showing, and ornaments attached all over. Basically, these things would make great Christmas tree ornaments (if you had a really big tree).
The rural leg of the trip was fairly boring by comparison. We passed a lot of poor neighborhoods, and several packs of stray dogs, but we also passed numerous signs for various snotty-sounding subdivisions which involved golf courses. Finally, we reached the Villa Ligaya, our home for the next few days. We got in at about midnight and basically went right to sleep, but I did find out a couple of interesting things: Hans and I were the only guests at the Villa that week, and there was some problem with getting an instructor so I could do the dives for my course.
The instructor problem never did get solved, which was really the one big problem with the trip. As I explained to the owner, the only reason I was even there was to do my dives. But they were just unable to find an instructor for me, apparently. So I made the best of it and did nine dives for fun while I was there (there was a divemaster available for us). I had my underwater camera with me, so it was at least a chance to practice my photography.
The Villa Ligaya is an interesting place. It has eleven beds, five of which are in an open-air dorm, and the others in two air conditioned rooms of three beds each. The open-air part gets a great sea breeze at night, but the mosquitos were getting to us, so we slept in a room with A/C. We still had plenty of time to sit out on the patio in the evening, where we heard some very loud geckos. I had no idea that geckos made noise, and assumed that the sound was from some sort of frog or bird, but once someone told me, it made sense. They actually sound like "GECK-o, GECK-o." I thought it was pretty cool to have these guys hiding around the house and hopefully eating some of the bugs that were after our blood.
Anilao itself, incidentally, is a fairly small and quiet town from what I can tell. It has few hotels, and none on the scale of the large resorts found on Mactan Island. And I'm pretty sure you won't find any fancy restaurants or big supermarkets in Anilao. Overall, a pretty laid back, rural, island kind of feel to it.
The fact that Hans and I were the only two guests was good and bad. The style of the Villa Ligaya really begs for a group of 8 or 10 people to party in the evenings after diving all day. Hans and I get along fine, but the excitement level with just two guys sitting around at night isn't the best (Hans' friend from the Philippines did stop by for a night, which helped). On the other hand, we felt like houseguests - the place is about the size of a house anyway. The staff cooked three (huge) meals a day for just the two of us, and there was always someone around to help with anything we needed (in fact, at one point we had to stop the guys who were shooing flies away during our meal - they would have stood there all evening fanning our food). The food was great; something different at every meal, always huge portions of several dishes, and always tasty. We had everything from pancakes to whole fish to chicken soup, along with a big bowl of garlic fried rice at every meal (it's surprisingly good with bacon and eggs). Maybe the oddest dish was the platter of what I called "crablets" - little crabs gathered from the rocky beach out back and fried in batter. You just pop them in your mouth whole. I'm just glad we ate them before I saw the spider in the bathroom that was disturbingly similar in size.
The other good thing about being the only two guests is that it was just the two of us and the divemaster on every dive. The divemaster was experienced (though for some reason he couldn't remember his PADI number when he signed off on my dive log) and seemed to be competent and to know the area well. His English wasn't great, which made him come across as perhaps a little less friendly and cut down on the conversation. In any case, I had no problems on any of the dives, and the divemaster was quite helpful in dealing with the equipment and in pointing out critters and such. I should also point out here that Villa Ligaya is set up with nitrox, and a technical diver would be better able to take advantage of what they (and the local dive sites) can offer.
I did nine dives in Anilao, but I'll spare the reader the play-by-play of each dive. We dived a lot of the better-known sites in the immediate area. The highlight for me was doing a dive at Cathedral, and then a night dive at the same site. A good chance to compare the daytime reef life to the nighttime reef life. Saw a couple of frogfish on the night dive, and a really cool spotted eel of some sort. I annoyed the heck out of a number of sea creatures who were trying to catch some sleep and didn't appreciate my flashlight in their faces. Cathedral is also unusual in the daytime because there are great swarms of reef fish wanting to be hand fed. A diver with food can actually disappear inside a cloud of fish at times. This was another occasion when my disapproval of feeding wild animals lost out to the fact that it is simply pretty cool to have a big bunch of reef fish all over you (they do nibble on those fingers, though...). Another interesting feature at this site is a stone cross that was planted at 15m by former President Ramos, who was an avid diver. (And it was even blessed by a bishop, or something, which I'm sure was a big relief to all the fish).
I didn't see any large animals on any of the dives, unfortunately, but I guess the larger critters are fairly uncommon in this area. And the corals, anenomes, and reef fish were really nice and made for good dives regardless. (Trust me - my photos just aren't so great because I'm still trying to figure out my underwater camera). Saw plenty of morays, lionfish, scorpionfish, and nudibranchs, too. Despite all this, I don't think I saw much in Anilao that I couldn't have seen in Cebu without the need for a three hour drive from the airport, so I'm not sure that I'd recommend Anilao above Cebu to someone coming for a short trip from a place as nearby as HK (where the drive more than doubles your travel time). To be fair, I probably did see more of everything in Anilao, and for a larger group or maybe a diving couple looking for peace and quiet, Villa Ligaya might be enough fun to make it worthwhile anyway.
We spent a couple of our surface intervals at beaches near the dive sites, which are nice and remote - they'd make great picnic spots. I actually managed to injure myself on one of those beaches, stepping on a thorn that impaled my left foot and left its tip imbedded (where it still is today, I imagine). The odd thing is that I was wearing my dive boots at the time, which means that was one serious thorn. The other minor injury that I suffered was also on my left foot (ironically, that's the one part of my anatomy which, for no good reason, is not covered by my disability insurance). We had to hop off the little boat into the surf each time we came back from a dive, and the "beach" at the Villa is very rocky. I slipped on a big rock under the water and just about broke my toe. It turned all sorts of unpleasant colors over the next few days, and made putting my fins on quite a challenge.
So I was walking funny by the time we left, between the imbedded thorn and the purple toe. But the trip back to HK was uneventful. We did get to see more of the area on the way to Manila, since it was daytime. There's some decent scenery, including a volcano and a large crater lake (sorry, no photos, we were going too fast). And we even passed a couple of guys at roadside stands selling those famous Batangas butterfly knives.
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